Ch 4: Whisperings

Mom reveals some things about my late sister, Marlee, while inadvertently revealing more about the web of secrets held in my family.

“Marlee would be twenty-eight today,” Mom murmured. She and I were the only ones home so I figured she was either talking to me or to herself. I didn’t look up from my book.  I was curled up in Dad’s big, comfy chair and didn’t want to be disturbed. Instead, I said, “Wow,” and kept on reading. I was in the middle of The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy, the third book in the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators’ series. Mom loved Hitchcock movies and, at age 10, I loved these books.

In this story, Hitchcock asks the boys, Jupiter, Pete, and Bob, to visit a professor friend of his who has a mummy who whispers to him in some mysterious language. The boys’ job is to figure out what the mummy is saying and why he is saying it. When Mom’s mutterings interrupted me, I had just reached an exciting part where Jupiter disguises himself as the professor and gets the mummy to whisper to him. For a minute, when Mom spoke, I thought it was the mummy whispering.